It’s Sex-Shaped, Dammit! The Myth of Vaginoplasty

A while back, in her podcast “In Bed with Susie Bright,” Susie mentioned the fad for vaginoplasty, in which women with perfectly healthy genitals have surgery for “correction.” Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly not letting a surgeon down there with a knife unless I really have to. I mean, hell, there are certain vibrators that look frightening to me! (I’ve never been a “tentacle” girl….) Also, how can you make something unique “correct”?

Seriously, though, this is all about fear.

The female sex, pussy, or whatever you want to call it, is beautiful, not shrink-wrapped to order. Here’s my take. If your lover can’t like your sex just the way it is, change the lover, not the vagina. As Susie so brilliantly puts it, pornography in the past was the first to demonstrate variety. Pictures of the female sex, which are meant for arousal, have often been displayed in an array. All those models don’t have the same pussy. They’re variously enticing and appeal in different ways. If there’s only one sort of sexy sex, why show the others?

For a part of the body that many of us expose the least, our sex can be tremendously defining. After all, when we’re sexually unconfident, the feelings can run deeply, affecting our moods, even our personalities. Activist writers such as Stephen Elliott explore how sexuality can affect our whole lives:

“If you are a sadist, someone who likes inflicting pain, then you need to find someone who craves pain instead of taking it out on those who don’t. And if you are a submissive, you need to find someone who enjoys controlling you rather than manipulating your lovers into a pattern of abuse.” From Stephen Elliott’s essay, “BDSM” in Dirty Words, ed. by Ellen Sussman.

There are a million questions that we can be asking ourselves about the way we are. What turns us on or off can affect us in powerful ways. Do you crave tenderness and/or pain? Or can pain be tenderness and tenderness, pain? What happens when you feel released and liberated? Do you enjoy having sex with yourself? If not, why not? If so, how does solo sex affect you? Have you looked at your sex in a mirror? If not, why not? Do you want to have sex at the moment? Maybe you don’t? Do you always want to climax during sex, or perhaps sex can be perfectly enjoyable without an orgasm? And as for our genitals, in true RuPaul wisdom, if we can’t love ourselves, how the hell we gonna love somebody else? (Amen!)

These are the questions we should be asking ourselves, not whether or not our genitals look right to a surgeon. And while plastic surgery can be immensely helpful under the right circumstances (for instance, I know that burn victims often find it life-changing), when it’s just about making ourselves more “beautiful” or “acceptable” to society—many of whom enjoy uniqueness more than sameness—it’s surely time to look inside, not out.

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